Page 14 of Bite Bonded Bride

"Then answer the observation." She shifts, pulling her knees toward her chest, making herself smaller in the space. Giving me more room. I do not move into it. "You hate us. Humans, I mean. I want to know why it's that kind of hate. One that looks like it's been sitting in you for a long time."

I should not answer. There is no strategic value in this conversation.

But the ruins groan around us, deeply settling and cracking somewhere we cannot see, and in the single bioluminescent stone I set between us there is just enough pale blue light to see that she is not asking to provoke me. She is asking because she wants to understand something. And I find, in this small and dying space, that I am unutterably tired of silence.

"My mother lost three children before me," I say. My voice comes out even. "The hunger took two. Dark elf hunters took the third. He was eleven years old. They strung what remained of him at the entrance to one of our lower districts as a message." I let that sit for a moment. "I was fourteen. Old enough to understand what the message meant. We were not enemies to them. We were not even prey." I keep my gaze on her, unflinching. "We were vermin. Things to be exterminated before they become inconvenient."

Cybele is very still.

"So when surface humans arrive in my tunnels," I continue, "I do not see individuals. I see the faces of the people who decided my brother was worth less than a warning sign." Something in my neck tightens. "That is the why of it."

She is quiet for a long while. Then, softly: "That's not hatred. That's grief."

I do not answer.

"Zareth." She says my name like she has the right to it, and the worst part is I no longer want to correct her. "I'm not them."

"No." The word comes out unbidden. Low. More honest than I’d planned. "You are not."

The silence after is heavier, charged with what I have been refusing to name since the moment I watched her shove me out of the path of a creature three times her size and take the injury herself. A human. Taking an injury for me. The absurdity of it. The way it cracked something open inside my chest that I cannot seem to close again.

I mark her with my eyes, the line of her jaw, the freckles scattered across her nose, the way the bioluminescent light turns the amber of her eyes to something richer and stranger. She is within my reach, has been for days and I have been treating that fact like a wound I needed to keep covered.

"I cannot stop thinking about you," I say. The words land like stone in the quiet. "You are short-lived. Fragile by every standard I understand. You should be nothing to me." A pause. "You are not nothing to me."

Her breath catches. I hear it, a small disruption in her rhythm and it pulls me forward, slow, inevitable, the way the corruption pulls at the mountain's foundations. Inevitable and unstoppable and disastrous. I lean in. Close enough to feel the warmth radiating from her skin and feel her breath against my mouth.

Her lips part, open and inviting.

The tunnel explodes.

Not with creatures but with stone. A deafening concussion of rock somewhere in the passage behind us, the entire alcove shuddering, dust cascading from above, a crack appearing in the ceiling like the mountain is deciding right now to make its judgment known.

We break apart. I am on my feet with my hand around her arm before the second rumble hits, pulling her against me as a section of ceiling drops into the space where she was sitting.

When the shaking stops, I am holding her. My heart, slower than hers, is not behaving like itself. I know these symptoms. Every Vrakken above a certain age knows them. The possessiveness that arrived without invitation and has not left. The constant, low thrum of her underneath my blood hunger, louder the closer she is and maddening when she's not. The soul-deep, cellular recognition that’s not a strategy and everything to do with the ancient and absolutely beyond my control. This is not an attachment, it’s a mating bond forming.

And when my people find out their prince has bound himself to a human surveyor, a surface woman who still carries maps of our kingdom in her hands, it will not only be my throne they come for. It will be her throat.

9

CYBELE

Nothing prepares me for the Obsidian Citadel. I've mapped cave systems for seven years. I've crawled through passages so narrow my shoulders scraped both walls. I thought I understood underground darkness.

I was wrong.

The cavern housing the Vrakken capital is so vast my mind refuses to see it as a ceiling. It looks like a black sky veined with pale blue bioluminescent stone, pulsing softly like breath. Below, rivers of magma cut through the districts in carefully carved channels, casting amber light against obsidian spires clawing toward the rock above. The city rises in enormous tiers, ancient in a way surface ruins could never match. It is the most terrifyingly beautiful thing I have ever seen.

And I walked straight into it.

Zareth says nothing as we pass through the main gates. Vrakken warriors line the carved stone thoroughfare, stopping mid-motion, mid-conversation, every pair of crimson eyes locking onto us with the precision of predators tracking movement in tall grass. The whispers start before we've taken ten steps.

He came back alone with her.

A human. He brought a human inside.

What is the prince thinking⁠—